Matthew Graham

WHILE Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Desmond Tutu are rightly venerated for their role in opposing and ending white minority rule in South Africa, another leader of the liberation years has been remarkably overlooked: Bantu Steven Biko, who led the enormously influential Black Consciousness Movement.

Four decades after his death in police custody on September 12, 1977, he deserves to be recognised as one of the towering heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Black Consciousness re-energised black opposition to apartheid and helped draw the world’s attention to the brutality of South Africa’s white minority rule. It began after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when established liberation movements such as the ANC and the PAC were banned by the government and forced into exile.

In 1969, with overt political activism and leadership largely dormant, Black Consciousness emerged from the SA Students’ Organisation to fill the void. Biko advocated that black liberation would only follow once psychological liberation from the internalised acceptance of racial oppression was achieved, arguing that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”.

At its heart, Black Consciousness demanded pride, self-assertion and self-confidence. Biko’s idea was that this would in turn stimulate a “revolution of the mind”, allowing oppressed peoples to overcome the racial inferiority and fear propagated by white racism so they could appreciate that they were not just “appendages to the white society”.

This relatively simple idea radically changed perceptions of the Struggle. It helped instil a new cultural and psychological outlook among the black population and thereby renewed the challenge to the apartheid system.

Biko turned ideas into a potent new weapon. The white minority state was slow to appreciate that the spread of ideas could not be contained by physical force alone. As a consequence, Biko was given a banning order in 1973, which confined him to King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape and prevented him from speaking in public. As Mandela put it, the state was so fearful of Biko’s influence “they had to kill him to prolong the life of apartheid”.

In 1977, Biko was killed after brutal interrogation and torture. Despite a subsequent political cover-up, the circumstances of his death were exposed, laying bare the violence of the apartheid state. His death led to greater international pressure against white minority rule.

So why hasn’t Black Consciousness left as deep an institutional footprint as the ANC and its like? Part of the answer is that as a movement, it was relatively weak organisationally.

Beyond its activists’ community projects, Black Consciousness was never an effective or broad-based

PICTURE: INDEPENDENT ARCHIVES Anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko, who founded the Black Consciousness Movement. Biko’s contributions to the Struggle have largely been overlooked, says the writer.